Marcos Benevides

Join us for a one-day conference on the theme of literature in language teaching. A number of literature-themed presentations will feature during the day.
Plenary
Marcos Benevides will talk about the ‘big picture’ when it comes to literature, and will frame his discussion about a robust discussion of lexical accessibility.
A lexical approach to developing western cultural fluency
Japanese students who study western literature in Japan typically suffer from two important deficits. The first is linguistic; that is, their English language ability is seldom up to the task of reading unadapted literary texts. The second is cultural; in particular, they often lack knowledge of the many classical and Judeo-Christian reference points which inform a majority of important works.
The linguistic deficit is relatively well understood. There is, for example, a strong consensus that learners need a vocabulary of the 3,000 or so of the most frequent words in English to read native speaker level texts at a decent rate of fluency. The cultural deficit, however, remains relatively invisible. Whereas readers normally notice when they come across unknown words, unknown references are more often overlooked. Also, unlike lexical units, it is difficult to enumerate the symbols, allusions, and archetypes that make texts rich. After all, how many New Testament parables does one need to know in order to follow Tess of the D’Urbervilles at an acceptable rate of cultural fluency? How many Greek gods do we need before we can ‘get’ Romantic poetry?
The answer, as with a lexical approach, may be that we need to begin by teaching a basic high-frequency ‘vocabulary’ of the most widely-used references in western culture. This talk is informed by the speaker’s experience developing such a system for Japanese university students.
This event is jointly sponsored by the Material Writers SIG, the ER SIG, GALE SIG, GILE SIG and the Hamamatsu and Toyohashi JALT chapters.